


from the dust of earth returning

by cryptidgay



Series: cry for judas [2]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Mike Townsend (is having a bad time), Morally Gray Jaylen Hotdogfingers, Season 9 Day X, post-season 9, season 10, the psychological impacts of spending 5 years dead / 3 years as a ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27502405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: Jaylen throws the ball in her hand as hard as she can at the wall in front of her. When it bounces, it goes through Mike’s torso, lands somewhere behind him. He stares at the spot it passed through for a moment; just beneath his heart, something reverberates, almost like a heartbeat. Almost.“I think,” Jaylen says, after a long silent moment, “I want to be alone.”(Jaylen, Mike, and the aftermath of season nine.)
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers & Mike Townsend
Series: cry for judas [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009932
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38





	from the dust of earth returning

**Author's Note:**

> this is a sequel to [all up the seething coast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26850853), though you don't necessarily need to read that one to understand this one. (if you decide not to read it, all you need to know is that my jaylen is very morally gray & my interpretation of the shadows is that mike is a ghost who only jaylen can see.) 
> 
> as per usual, i pick and choose which bits of fanon i use in my fics, so this might not totally align with what's on the wiki! i tried to keep things consistent as far as actual in-game events, but also, everything happens so much in blaseball, so i might've fucked up. i know nothing about irl baseball. this fic begins in the immediate aftermath of season 9 day x, and continues through mid-season 10.
> 
> title from [lacrimosa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y8q3gUdDZI) by regina spektor.

When all is said and done and the smoke has cleared, Choux Stadium is a disaster zone.

The stands are empty. The crowd ran to cover when the emergency alert sounded, and hypocritical as it may be after all she’s done, Jaylen is thankful for the lack of casualties. She counts the heads she can see through the smoke: the Shoe Thieves are all present. This, too, she finds it in herself to thank  _ someone _ for.

Whether or not her destructive path has waned in the last two years, Jaylen is hyperaware that she will always be remembered as a vengeful spirit, alive and dead and  _ wrong-wrong-wrong. _ (Better that than to not be remembered at all.) Still. There are lines drawn in her mind, faint as they may be. She’s got no doubt they all signed their souls away on some dotted line when they joined the league; she can’t remember the contract, can’t recall if she’d looked for the fine print. Perhaps she’s fine with lives being forfeit to pay her debt, but — there is no exchange here. The Shelled One offers no deals, no  _ mercy, _ no matter what it may have said, and —

Jaylen’s been given no reason to trust the gods. This is no different.

So yeah, she’s glad everyone’s safe.

What remains is nothing but aftermath. In some areas, the seats are covered in enough peanuts to obscure that there were ever seats to begin with, like a Golden Boy supply truck got overturned on the great highway in the sky. The Crabs stand in the outfield. They bunch together, staring at the mess and at each other; maybe they didn’t have enough time to flee after their game ended or maybe they didn’t want to, and maybe it doesn’t matter if that was a choice or not. There’s not a chance in hell they would have been allowed to help the Thieves in their doomed game anyways.

Pieces of the stadium litter the field, and something awful twists in her ribcage at the sight. Charleston has been Jaylen’s home — only for lack of a more fitting word — for only a month. Not nearly long enough to feel such  _ ownership _ over it. She can count on one hand the number of games she’s played in this jersey, and yet there is something in her that says: this happened on  _ my _ field. In  _ my _ stadium. To  _ my _ team.

And maybe that’s just how it is. Maybe she would feel the same on any field, in any city, with any team, after a game like that. Maybe it’s just the aftermath of whatever the  _ fuck _ just happened, making her feel like she’s going to puke or scream or die or do all of the above in quick succession.

She doesn’t do any of that. She just  _ stands there, _ frozen solid on the pitching mound.

Her ears are still ringing, not like an explosion but like a phone line that refuses to connect, a phone call she would give anything not to pick up.  _ Ring, ring. _ Even if she did scream, who would be able to hear it above the din? Who would care?

It isn’t that she blames the Shoe Thieves for not giving a shit. They saw her when she was freshly necromanced and had smoke billowing off her skin, when her touch meant debt paid. She must have killed some of them. The fact that she doesn’t remember their names is another point against her, in their books. Esme has made it very clear that any remorse Jaylen could show means absolutely nothing here, and so she shows none.

Regret doesn’t quite connect, anyways. Her brain isn’t wired that way anymore. She’s been in survival mode at any cost for far too long; fight or flight but it’s  _ always _ fight and it’s  _ always _ happening, kicking and screaming and clawing towards the goddamn light. She didn’t try to apologize to any of the teams she was feedbacked to because it didn’t  _ matter, _ because it wouldn’t have meant anything anyways. So what if she killed some of their friends? There is action, and there is consequence, and  _ none _ of it fucking matters. Not for her.

Not usually.

Here and now, she stands on the mound in Charleston and waits for some divine retribution to strike her down once again. She hears ringing in her ears. She is horribly aware that she was the one to throw that final pitch; she let Jessica Telephone score a home run and end the game. 

Action. There will be consequences. She doesn’t know what they’ll be.

Everything had moved too quickly for her to think, like a migraine in feedback, looping loudly enough to drown out anything approaching coherency, but there had been a few moments of perfect clarity between innings. She’d check her pulse and she’d wish harder than she’d ever wished for  _ anything _ but survival that her throws could do something. Anything. It was supposed to be a good thing, Jaylen renegotiating her debt, figuring out ways to quiet down the aching smoke-tinged hunger that keeps her alive. It was supposed to  _ help. _

And yet. On the mound in front of the Shelled One’s army, all she could think about was how much she’d like to throw the ball directly at any of them and have it  _ mean _ something. How good it would be to watch them burn.

Even knowing it would do nothing, she’d aimed that final pitch directly at Telephone’s smug smile.

(She’d known, even as she’d done it, that it was a mistake. Too easy a pitch. Jaylen plays angry ninety-nine percent of the time, but… Not like this. Not to the point that she makes  _ mistakes. _ Not when it fucking matters.)

Her ears keep ringing.

The Shoe Thieves are gathered by second base, hugging each other, holding one another close, and they don’t spare their pitcher a second glance. She’d given that game her all and it hadn’t been nearly enough, and what’s the fucking  _ point _ of her revival if she can’t do this? They don’t even look at her, and she’s glad for it, somewhere deep and awful. She doesn’t need to be a part of their family. Her own team — because even if she gets tossed around the league, Seattle was hers and always will be hers, she was given the key to the goddamn city before she died and somewhere in a cemetery there is still a gravestone with her name on it, it’s her  _ home _ — her own team hates her, and even so, she isn’t looking for a replacement.

Her ears keep ringing, and ringing, and ringing, and —

She makes a point to step on as many peanut shells as she can on her way out of the stadium. It isn’t even a noticeable percentage of the millions littering the stadium, but the crunch of it underneath her sneakers is satisfying nonetheless. Nobody looks up at the sound.

***

It’s late enough that the neon open signs of bars and restaurants have all paused their incandescent hum, and shadows blanket the streets of Charleston as Jaylen walks home.

Mike walks beside her, when he can. When a stray window-light isn’t blocking his path, making him blink out of existence and then blink back to himself, disoriented after a moment of nothingness. He’s learned, by now, to avoid even trying to stand in the light. It isn’t painful — nothing really  _ hurts, _ like this, not in any way he can put words to — but it’s as close as he gets, nowadays. It isn’t a good feeling.

He wasn’t there for most of the final game. He’d found a spot in the stands to watch the final Shoes versus Crabs matchup, but between the flashing of sirens, the eclipses going past at lightning-speed, the stadium lights turned up further than he knew lightbulbs could  _ go _ and casting the field in a deathly brightness, he hadn’t been able to keep a calm mind long enough to find a dark place.

Well. He probably wouldn’t have been able to, regardless. Face it; Mike isn’t the person you go to when you need  _ calm; _ at least, he wasn’t, when he was alive, not until that last choice he made. His hands didn’t shake at all, grabbing onto Jaylen’s hand and taking her place in the shadows. This was an anomaly. He doesn’t know that he could repeat it. Now that he’s somewhere in-between it’s easier to be some kinda voice-of-reason, but only while the world isn’t  _ actively ending. _

It didn’t end, but it sure as hell seemed like it would for a while there. He’d waited in the parking lot, watched the spectators rush into their cars and drive far away, and he’d listened to the too-clear boom of the peanut’s taunts from above, and he’d  _ waited, _ and —

Now he’s here, walking beside Jaylen.

When he looks at her, she’s shaking. The smoke around her cleared with her first debt renegotiation two years ago, but she looks like a house on fire, about to collapse in on itself. She looks like pillars loose and trembling and unmoored from the ceilings they were meant to support.

Mike’s spent the last three years in Jaylen’s shadow, and he’s seen her in a lot of different states. The smug disconnect from concepts of life and death; the graveburied grief; the desperation to stay alive, no matter the cost, no matter how many people were hurt in the process. The thing about Jaylen — and he noticed this before she even came back, watching and rewatching old tapes of her games — is that she’s made of desperate passion; everything she does is done with the fervor of a game-winning grand slam.

It’s kind of funny, if he thinks about it, given their respective situations: this is the first time she’s seemed like a ghost. Unstable, flickering, vibrating halfway out of existence.

“You okay?” He says it quietly. The whole city’s quiet. It should be a celebration, after a final series like that; there should be a parade for the Shoe Thieves. Every splorts bar should be overflowing with cheers. Instead, a deathly anticipation has settled its full weight over the tops of the buildings, buried all of Charleston’s people in its shroud.

Jaylen doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even look up. It’s like she doesn’t hear him at all.

In her apartment, Mike tries again. “Jay? You wanna talk about it?”

Jaylen sits on the edge of her bed. Mike can’t read the look on her face, but it can’t be anything good. She shakes her head — at the very least, confirmation that she can hear him.

“We lost,” Jaylen says, voice hollow.

“Yeah.”

“I should’ve been able to do something.”

Mike stays silent.

“What the fuck is the  _ point _ of this if I can’t  _ do anything?” _

Jaylen throws the ball in her hand as hard as she can at the wall in front of her. When it bounces, it goes through Mike’s torso, lands somewhere behind him. He stares at the spot it passed through for a moment; just beneath his heart, something reverberates, almost like a heartbeat. Almost.

“I think,” Jaylen says, after a long silent moment, “I want to be alone.”

Mike retreats. He’ll come back later. Maybe she’ll be ready to talk, then. Maybe he can coach her through baking something, cheer her up in the only way he’s ever known how to cheer anyone up. It would be easier if he could do it himself, but, well. Only so much can be done in the in-between space he’s found himself in.

***

Jaylen wakes up and the shadows in her apartment are just areas blocked from light. Nothing moves in them. Nothing lives, or unlives, or dies. It’s just darkness.

She knows what it means, but she checks the news anyways, confirms it.

Mike Townsend has been freed from the shadows. He’s back with the Garages. He’s been brought home.

Whatever deal they made for his life, she hopes he can live with the consequences.

***

It’s unpleasant, to say the least, to go from nothingness to a sudden reemergence in the land of  _ somethingness. _

Okay, Mike’s being too kind to the universe in that assessment. Here’s the truth: it fucking  _ hurts. _ His head pounds. The overhead lights of the stadium blare directly into his eye sockets and out the other side. It’s like the world’s worst hangover.

When he opens his eyes, he’s in the Garage. He’s laying on the field, plastic faux-grass digging into the skin of his arm where it’s wedged beneath his chest; it’s like he took a bad tumble from somewhere and landed badly. 

He takes a groggy moment to consider the past three years as if they were one very long dream.

Like, okay. He’s never remembered his dreams in much detail before, but that’s not a reason it  _ couldn’t _ have been one. Sacrificing himself for Jaylen, watching her come back, being stuck in places the light didn’t reach while she walked around throwing death at dozens of players. All the conversations he had with her; something he’s nervous to call friendship, but it must’ve been  _ close _ to that, right? By the end there, he could swear they were friends.

It’s all a bit too much.

But then again: that’s blaseball for you. Mike was sitting in the stands when Jaylen was incinerated. Saw the bright flash of light, the smoke. He sat frozen still while the people around him screamed, because some part of his mind refused to connect the spontaneous human combustion of the best pitcher in the league with  _ reality. _

And he was there through season two, season three, when it seemed like every day there was news of a new death. If they were lucky, it was on a field halfway across the country, a team the Garages had never played before and hadn’t had a chance to form any friendships on. If they weren’t, it happened in their own stadium. An umpire’s eyes flashing white, and then… Someone gone. Blame the watering of eyes on the smoke hanging in the air and pretend you weren’t a little relieved it wasn’t you.

He can’t pretend any of it was a dream. Not for any longer than a few seconds. Blaseball doesn’t leave a lot of room for that kind of uncertainty; every terrible thing that happens to them all is horrible in its clarity, even the things he cannot comprehend.

Mike pulls himself up until he’s sitting in the middle of the field. His hands hit his glasses, scattered to the ground at some point between loading into the van to drive into the void and being spit from the shadows with all the grace of a wad of gum onto pavement. When he tries to put them on, they’re cracked down the middle.

The field is empty, until it isn’t. It takes ten minutes for the team to start rushing the field from wherever they’ve been, Duende in the lead and the rest of them following, and soon he’s surrounded by people, all living and breathing and hearts beating march time.

“You missed a hell of a lot, Townsend,” Duende says. Mike doesn’t know how to say he didn’t miss any of it, not really; how could he explain that just because none of them could  _ see _ him doesn’t mean he didn’t exist? He spent more than a year mapping out the dark spots of the Garages’ stadium, watching his team — his  _ friends _ — play game after game.

He doesn’t say it. Just smiles. It’s strained.

“Good to have you home,” says Gwiffin. The sentiment is echoed across the small crowd.

“Yeah,” Mike says, his voice weak even to his own ears. He feels a little more solid with a dozen people surrounding him; not everyone is a familiar face, but after so long in the cold any warmth is welcome.

It’s louder here than anything has been in several years, and still, somehow, the quietest he’s ever heard the Garages. Even in the aftermath of that first incineration, it was all noise and screams and shouting across the field to ensure everyone was accounted for, aside from the obvious pile of ashes by second base — Mike’d been the only quiet one amidst that cacophony. Now, there’s something somber hanging over every moment of whispered celebration. Every  _ welcome back _ carries the weight of what he sacrificed himself for and whether it was worth it, and the looming threat on the horizon.

He thinks of Jaylen back in Charleston, and wonders if they’d given her the same welcome when she’d come back. If they would, now, after all that’s happened. If her doing what they always said they’d do in her honor,  _ fighting god, _ had made any difference. It’s not like he’d blame them for their distance, their distaste, during the days when Jaylen was murdering her way across the league without remorse, but — in those early days, before the consequence of their actions became clear, had they hugged her? Said it was good to have her home, told her how much she’d missed?

He’ll ask them later, he thinks.

He’ll call her later. Let her know he’s back.

Or maybe it’s kinder not to call, not to ask — let her call him, give her the time alone she’d asked for. He’s not sure how long ago that was. It feels like he blinked right afterwards and woke up here, but his sense of time is not to be trusted. That was true long before his stint in the shadows.

So he won’t call. He’ll just… sit on the field, surrounded by his old friends and new teammates, and wait. He’s good at that.

***

It’s a month into the off-season when Jaylen is awoken from a dead sleep to the sound of microphone feedback.

There are words in the static; she sits up, squints into the darkness, tries to make anything out. A shape, a voice, a person in the shadows.  _ Anything. _ There’s been a low dread gnawing away at her since that fucking game started. Since she came back to life. Since she signed her name and her soul away when she joined the league. Since birth.

When she first returned, when her debt was first made apparent to the league, she’d heard talk of people wanting to send her back to the void, so she keeps a knife on her bedside table and a blaseball beside it. She reaches for them both.

And the voice says her name, and her arm freezes halfway through the motion.

And there’s —

There’s —

Once, when Jaylen was a kid, her mom took her hiking in the Rockies. They’d driven as far up as the road went and walked the rest of the way, and by the end of the steep trail her legs were  _ aching _ , but the air was so fresh and clear and cold that every gasped breath felt like coming alive. She’d picked up a rock and thrown it off a ledge with all the strength her eleven-year-old arms could muster, and it’d gone further than she could see. She’d had this stupid idea that it would soar forever; that somewhere, high above sea level, that pebble was still circling the globe.

It’s like that. She feels like the mountain air and the stone all at once.

She’s fucking  _ weightless. _

In the dark of her bedroom, she looks down at her hands, and sees that no smoke clings to their edges; the flickering that has waited patiently on the outskirts of her flesh since her return is gone. Just like that. The old ringing in her ears dissipated weeks ago, but here it returns. It takes a moment for her to recognize it as the steady beating of her own heart.

_ I’m dying again, _ she thinks for a moment. Shakes her head. No, she’s  _ alive. _ She realizes only now that she hasn’t  _ really _ felt alive since she came back — only by comparison to this sudden brightness does the feeling of the past few years seem so dull. Only in this contrast does she know that her existence, from the moment she came back to this moment, has been  _ wrong. _

(Is this how everyone else has felt? This entire time, have they all been this alive?

How many people did she take this from?

Does the answer matter?)

“Thank you,” she says into the air. Her voice is still hoarse from sleep. It might be the most genuine thing she’s said since she got back, and that’s fucked up, isn’t it?

The static buzzes. It’s almost feedback-loud; she resists the impulse to cover her ears, but not the impulse to look down at her rumpled sleep-shirt and see if it’s turned into a brand new team’s jersey. It’s the same ratty thrifted Garages tee she fell asleep in. (She’d found it in a Gloodwill in Montreal. It’d seemed like some kind of sign, then, but now it just seems sad.)

The volume crescendos and decrescendos, and by the end it’s melancholy at the edges; its notes have turned minor. Jaylen can’t understand  _ why. _ She feels better than she has since she died.

For years, her only goal has been to stay alive. Whatever the cost; whatever she owed to whomever she owed it. Now, she knows that her debt has been paid. She owes nothing to anybody. She is alive, truly and completely.

Jaylen laughs into the empty air of her apartment, hears it echo back to her, joyful and alive.

It feels  _ wonderful. _

***

“Townsend, you in there?”

Theodore Duende’s voice startles the quiet of Mike’s apartment and kicks his anxiety immediately into high-gear. In one quick movement, he’s leapt off the (bare, plain) sofa and wound up in the middle of his (bare, plain, boring) living room, in his (bare, plain, boring,  _ lifeless _ ) new home that he’s still acclimating to the dimensions of.

“Mike?”

Mike’s apartment is dark. The only light is what’s coming through the window on the far wall, and the sun set… a while ago. He doesn’t know when. And his place is on the outskirts of the city, so there’s not much in the way of ambient light outside ‘side from the streetlight down the block — because it’s hard to rent an apartment on what was left in his bank account when he, uh,  _ retreated into the shadows. _ That’s what they called it, apparently. When the blessings were announced. Three years ago.

So, it’s weird to be back. Really and fully and truly present in a space. He keeps bumping into things — the sofa, the corner of his dresser, shins banging against the coffee table that doubles as a dining room table, even the walls, a few times — and surprising himself by not going right through. He’s too solid, takes up too much room that should be thin air. Mike no longer knows how to occupy a body.

He doesn’t know how to do  _ any _ of it, really. Talking to people, existing, going to weekly offseason practices (gotta stay in pitching shape, Mikey — and, y’know, he hears the undercurrent there, the  _ you were never a good pitcher and three years without touching a blaseball can’t’ve helped that any, _ and he can’t blame them for it because it’s  _ true), _ eating two square meals a day if he remembers to do so.

It’s not like it was easy, existing only half the time and only out of direct light, but he realizes now that he’d gotten pretty good at it.

And Teddy’s still knocking.

Mike considers not answering. Considers it for a very, very long moment; Duende’d understand, he thinks. Hopes. He knows how hard it’s been for Mike.

On the other hand. It might be important. The anxiety of talking to a person face-to-face grapples with the anxiety of missing whatever’s important enough for Teddy to come all the way across the city to his apartment, and the latter wins by just a hair. Mike’s footsteps echo in his ears as he makes his way to the door.

“Hey,” he says. He’s trying to sound cool, casual, but he misses it by a mile. The way his hands won’t stop fidgeting with the hem of his shirt must be a dead giveaway, but even hyperconscious of his actions, he can’t  _ stop _ them. Without something to mess with, he’ll just wind up echoing through his own thoughts, over and over, and, well — that’s no better than the shadows, right? No different than that half-alive space. He’s alive now. He needs the proof, needs to be able to touch things, hear his own breath, ground himself.

“Hey, Townsend,” says Teddy. Gives Mike that  _ look, _ the Captain Look™, the one that lets Mike know that Teddy knows precisely how anxious Mike is right now.

The problem with Duende is —

Well. If Mike were being honest with himself, there’s a couple problems with the Garages, as a whole. He loves them. He does. But sometimes when he looks at them the tune to  _ Mike Townsend (Is a Disappointment) _ starts playing, unprovoked, in his head. Or the way Teddy said  _ I can’t believe you’re our new pitcher _ when Mike stepped up to take Jaylen’s place in the rotation. The way Mike only realized years after the fact that it was an insult.

And that’s just how the team  _ is, _ y’know? They don’t mean anything by it. He’s, objectively, a shitty pitcher. He knows that.

But he had a lotta time to think in the shadows. Lotta times he’d pop into Jaylen’s line of sight and she’d start strumming one of the songs about him on her guitar — at first, it was always  _ Disappointment, _ and it always stung. 

(And he thought back to how much it’d ached, hearing that song on the radio the first time. Driving to practice and hearing his own name, his team’s name, and then…

He hadn’t said anything at practice. Not like the team could’ve noticed his pitching being worse than usual; the bar is low enough that a brave face and his usual  _ disappointing _ blaseball skills had let him go by unnoticed.)

Sometimes, towards the end, it was  _ Credit to the Team. _ Sometimes, when the dark of the shadows masked his presence almost entirely, he’d catch her playing  _ Knows What He’s Gotta Do, _ with a melancholy that wasn’t present in the band’s version, not at all. They’d taken his left-behind napkinscribble lyrics and made them into some kind of anthem. In Jaylen’s smoke-scratched voice, it was a mourning song.

Never really figured out why, or for who. He meant to ask, but, well.

Duende’s looking at him like he’s expecting an answer to something. Mike realizes he’s missed the question. He doesn’t know if five seconds or five minutes have passed. The hem of his shirt is fraying apart between his worrying fingertips. “Sorry, what?”

“It okay if I come in?”

Mike nods, backs away from the doorway and into his shitty, empty apartment. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Duende hovers near the wall just inside the doorway, and Mike nudges the door shut with his foot. “Just wanted to check in, see how you’re holdin’ up.” He pauses. Squints at Mike for a second. “You got lights in here?”

It’s like Mike blinks, and the abnormalcy of a pitch-dark apartment shifts into being. (One second, it’s — it’s not  _ normal, _ maybe, but it’s the only way he  _ can _ exist, it’s comforting — but no, that isn’t true anymore, is it? Maybe it’s time to figure out how to exist in the light again.) “Sorry. Uh, again,” he says, flicking on the lightswitch and hearing it buzz to life a moment before the light floods in. “I guess I forgot. You know how it is.”

Teddy doesn’t, because he’s never been in the shadows, never existed that way, but he nods anyways. “Yeah,” he says. “You adjusting alright?”

There is a correct answer here. It’s been a month since Mike tumbled out of the shadows and onto the field. “Yeah, of course,” Mike says, lying through his teeth. He adds a smile as an afterthought, then feels the awkward way it stretches across his face and drops it just as quickly. “I’m fine, Duende. It’s weird, but so’s everything in this splort, right?”

“Fair point,” says Teddy. Mike’s worried for a moment that he won’t drop it, will push Mike into having a  _ talk _ about  _ feelings _ and how, okay, maybe he’s having a difficult time with the whole deal, having sacrificed himself for someone who murdered  _ several _ people, having existed in a nowhere-space for years, maybe that’s not the easiest thing in the world —

But Teddy doesn’t say anything else about it. Instead: “Also. Wanted to check: you turned on the news today?”

Mike hasn’t even figured out how to hook his TV up yet. The hours just pass by without his permission. He’s not even sure when he last looked at his phone. He shakes his head.

“Oh shit, you haven’t heard, then. Good news. Promise. Jaylen’s debt’s gone.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “Microphone — Wyatt? I, uh, I’m still not sure what happened with that whole deal, gonna be honest — anyways, Microphone cleared her debt, apparently. So. No more beaning.”

“Stupid thing to call it,” Mike says, automatically. An echo of a half-dozen conversations with Jaylen on the matter. At a certain point, it was easier to make fun of the news’ phrasing with her than it was to try to change her actions, especially once the hit-by-pitches wound up  _ helping _ the people hit. 

“What, beans? Guess so.” He doesn’t question Mike’s inexplicably strong opinions on the matter, and that’s probably for the best. “Anyways, thought you’d wanna know. What with,” and Duende waves his hands aimlessly, as if to encompass Mike’s journey into Hell in one smooth motion, “and all that.”

(The team doesn’t know he was still present for those three years, still. He hasn’t figured out how to say that he was Jaylen’s shadow, specifically. Can’t sort out enough words in the right order to describe how it feels to be a ghost.

So it’s just the initial sacrifice Duende’s talking about. Meanwhile, Mike thinks about all the conversations he had with Jaylen — trying to figure out what she was doing, the effects of it all, the encouragement to do whatever she could to change it. He still doesn’t know how much of an impact he made, but… He’d like to think he was a part of something. A redemption arc, or some shit.)

“Yeah,” Mike says. “That’s — that’s great. Thanks for telling me.”

“Y’know,” and, oh, Duende’s back to looking serious, that can’t be good. “If you need anything, the team’s here for you. I know there’s some new faces since you were last around, but they’re all good people. Call any of us, okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Mike says. It doesn’t feel like a lie on his tongue, but he knows it isn’t true the moment it hits open air. The concern makes him uncomfortable, anxious, makes him feel like slipping into the shadows again, and it’s strange how nice it was to be able to just  _ disappear, _ in retrospect. Grass being greener, he guesses.

“Gonna see you at practice tomorrow?” Duende’s making his way back to the door already. Did he really come all this way, just for that? Mike doesn’t know how to feel about that. More anxious than he already was, probably.

Mike nods. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“Cool,” Duende says. Pats Mike on the arm once in something that might be an affectionate gesture, might be something Mike was used to pre-shadows and has forgotten how to react to now. (He tries not to flinch, and halfway succeeds, and Duende gives him a look like he understands but he  _ doesn’t.) _ And then he’s gone, and Mike’s apartment is empty again.

He turns the lights back out. The darkness is equally comforting and terrifying, but he’ll take what he can get.

***

Jaylen’s life exists only in contrasts.

She knew she was dead because she did not feel alive, and she knows, now, that she is alive because she no longer feels dead. Her heart beats a clamor in her ears, which she only notices now that it is not silent. She is warm, all the time, and hadn’t realized before that she’d been corpse-cold. She is Jaylen because she could not be anyone else. She does the things she does because she could not do anything else. 

It is the off-season, because she is not playing blaseball. It’s going by slow as molasses. 

Another thing only realized in comparison: the time between seasons, before, had blurred to the point of nonexistence. Blink and wake up in a new stadium; blink and wake up and pitch a game; blink and the months in-between seasons have gone by in a snap. Her first off-season had lasted barely a goddamn week before she’d gone up in smoke; the ones that followed her resurrection had hardly existed in an entirely different way.

She knows she is consistently present in herself, watching the days go past at the same speed as everyone around her, only because, for  _ so long, _ she was not.

Jaylen’s sneakers kick up dust as she runs down the bike lane. Her heart pounds in time. She’s picked up hobbies — running in the mornings has become a habit in a manner of weeks, if only to give her a way to pass the time. 

She must have worked out between seasons somehow, before, to stay in shape for the game, but — she can’t remember how, now. Can’t recall what she’d done for all those months. Memory’s a fickle thing, and it blurs together: the things she knows, the things she doesn’t; the things she knew when she was first alive and forgot somewhere in-between, buried halfway in the darkness.

She remembers that week of off-season after the great return of blaseball, remembers she’d spent it mostly at Allison’s apartment, fooling around with new songs with the band now that they had months and months to dedicate to music again, but she can’t remember who else was there. She remembers the first time she played a real blaseball game as a kid, but not the name of the team. She remembers her parents’ names but not their faces; knows they’re dead but not where they’re buried. She remembers what it felt like to burn alive, but she’s got no idea what her last words were or who might’ve heard them. She remembers scattered moments out of the last three years of her life, and she hopes like hell her mind will gain some goddamn  _ consistency, _ now that the halfway-metaphorical sword through her chest has been pulled out and the wound cleaned.

She remembers she talked to Mike a lot, those last couple years. Doesn’t quite remember what they’d talked about, but that’s less about the smoke in her mind and more about the sheer number of conversations, impossible to hold onto all at once.

But he’s gone now. News said he’s back with the Garages. And that’s good. That’s  _ good. _ Jaylen is happy for him.

She isn’t lonely, but if she were, maybe she’d run to distract herself. Maybe kicking up clouds of dust in whichever Charleston she’s opened her apartment door to this time would make her feel better about it, or at the very least, let her lose herself for a while. Detach. Focus on the music booming in her half-price headphones with the broken volume knob, step away from her thoughts. Forget about death and the Garages and the damn peanut.

Maybe it’s not working all that well.

The heat sticks to her skin and makes her feel like she’s burning all over again, so she dips into the closest cafe and tries not to sigh too loudly at the relief of air conditioning. Eyes move to her, anyways, and avert just as quickly. It’s no longer the sense that she’s  _ wrong, _ that she shouldn’t exist as she is, caught halfway between life and death — the easy scapegoat is gone. People just don’t like her.

(That’s fine. She doesn’t need to be likeable, doesn’t exist for easy consumption. During the main season, she might put on a grin, a sneer, act the heel to the best of her ability.  _ All showmanship. _ They want to think she’s a monster for doing what she has to to survive — fine. She can play the beast.

Right now, she’s tired. She meets nobody’s eyes. She looks at the ground.)

“One water,” Jaylen says. “Please,” she tacks on, for good measure.

“Alright, coming right up,” says the teenage cashier, looking past Jaylen rather than at her. By their accent Jaylen figures she’s in one of the Charlestons in Oceania. Probably Australia, but New Zealand can’t be discounted. She’s never been very good at accents, or geography, or — well, anything that comes with being on a team like this, untethered to any one spatial point.

Her first week on the Thieves, someone’d shoved a piece of paper into her hands with a list — not even a  _ map, _ just a list — of the various Charlestons their team got shuffled between. She’d lost track of it almost immediately.

She knows she is in Charleston, because the jerseys in her closet this morning had all been Shoe Thieves jerseys. She knows she is in Charleston because the gods would not let her shuffle away to another team so easily. No; she has to live with her defeat, here. Rebuilding ruins of Choux Stadium hovering on the horizon; Shelled One’s voice still ringing in her ears, in her nightmares.

Another voice floats towards her from the back room of the cafe, door slightly ajar.

“Are you sure that’s her?”

And another voice:

“Am I  _ sure—” _

“You don’t even follow splorts, Vee!”

“Jesus, just ‘cuz I don’t follow splorts doesn’t mean I didn’t watch when they were  _ fighting a god. _ I’m telling you. That’s  _ Jaylen. _ You know. The one they brought—”

“—Back from the dead, yeah, I  _ know. _ I’m actually a splorts fan.”

“Okay, cut out that bullshit, just because I don’t watch every game—”

Jaylen doesn’t mind people talking about her.

“You only tune in for the championships, what d’you even  _ know _ about her?”

Usually.

“I mean — she got her ass kicked, didn’t she? By the peanut.”

She likes the attention. She likes eyes on her, wondering what she’ll do next. It lets her know she’s alive. People can see her, so she must be.

“Heard she just sat on the field and cried for like,  _ three hours _ after the game finished.”

She hates  _ pity. _

“I’unno if  _ that’s _ true, but — must be sad, right? Losing like that. It must feel—”

Jaylen coughs, pointedly, before she can hear what she  _ must feel. _ She doesn’t need to know. She’s feeling it already. One of the teenagers squeaks, high-pitched, and a moment later, sets a glass of water in front of Jaylen.

_ Please don’t try to talk to me about it, _ Jaylen thinks, because she’s never quite gotten out of the habit of sending halfhearted wishes up to  _ somewhere, _ even knowing none of the things that could be listening would help. Not without a cost, at least, and avoiding a single conversation isn’t worth losing more pieces of herself.

Her hopes go ignored. Obviously.

“We were just wondering,” the barista says, ignoring the gestures from their friend that translate roughly to  _ not ‘we’, leave me out of this; _ “are you, like, okay? After all that.”

She doesn’t quite know what it is about the question that puts her guard up in record time. Maybe it’s the sorrow in the kid’s voice. The overheard conversation. The fact that, in three fucking months since Day X, this is the  _ first person _ who’s asked — aside from Mike, right before he’d vanished. The fact that she’s across the world from the only place that’s ever felt like a home. The fact that she can’t remember the last time she even talked to a person. Not even a conversation, just — more than three words. She can’t  _ remember, _ and it isn’t her memory being scattered in a pile of ash on a field somewhere, it’s just that it’s been a really fucking long time.

Her glass is half empty when she slams it down on the counter. Harder than she’d meant to. The clang of it echoes around the small space, and Jaylen’s gone before the echoes stop.

***

A ball ricochets off the side of a stadium wall.

It’s cloudy in Seattle, rain hovering in the air more than coming down. It’s that oppressive sort of dampness that feels something like wading through a swimming pool filled to the brim with molasses; the sound of the ball hitting hangs in the humidity a moment longer than it should, and the sound’s shadow lingers even longer.

Mike could, technically, go inside the stadium and practice under the cover of an actual roof. Apparently the holes in the stadium’s ceiling were repaired in the time he was gone. The bloodrain finds a way to make it in regardless, but he’s been told it does the trick at keeping the mundane sorts of rain Seattle is so frequently blanketed in at bay. The rest of the team is probably inside already; it’s a week before the season starts, and training has moved from once every two weeks to once a week to once a day in preparation. He could join them.

He could, but he doesn’t. He throws the ball again, to the same place, and catches it as it ricochets back, or else runs halfway down the parking lot to retrieve it as it bounces a retreat. Out here, nobody has to see him fumble with it. There’s neither the playful ribbing that always cuts a little too close to home or the nudges of pity —  _ give him a break, he hasn’t picked up a ball in three years, we can’t expect him to be any good, _ as if he’s gotten any worse at all in the time he was gone.

The rain smudges on his glasses severely enough that he takes them off entirely, lives with the world itself being blurry instead. He throws the ball. He catches it. His denim jacket is soaked through, and weighs about a thousand pounds against his shoulders. He doesn’t take it off. He fumbles with the ball, then throws it, and catches it.

Y’don’t get rain, in the shadows. Overcast days provide for good cloud cover, a reprieve from the dangers of sunlight, but the feeling of water hitting skin is lost. As with most other things, the droplets passed straight through him.

He remembers walking beside Jaylen down a street in… Philly? He thinks it was Philly. It was sunny enough Mike had to stick carefully to the shadows of buildings until it wasn’t, and the both of them looked around for the oncoming eclipse, for umpires lurking somewhere just out of view ready to stride forward with eyes ablaze — and then they’d realized it was only a the bloated gray clouds of a storm moving in, and each pretended they hadn’t seen that flicker of bone-deep fear on the other’s expression.

And the sky had opened up, all at once.

Mike, even after two years and change of living as a ghost, had darted under the nearest store awning in an instant. Felt foolish for it almost immediately, but didn’t move. Meanwhile, Jaylen had stood in the middle of the street, head tilted upwards.

It’d been so long since she’d come back to life — two seasons, three off-seasons — and still, seeing the rain hit her was the closest thing to happiness Mike’d seen on her face. A smile, faint, but present, and without cruelty sharpening its edges. Just the weather and the suddenly empty streets and Jaylen Hotdogfingers, alive, standing in a downpour.

“Um,” Mike’d said, eloquently.

“What?” It’d been half a snap, but without the accompanying bite.

“Nothing. Do you — uh, do you want an umbrella?”

Jaylen didn’t point out how he couldn’t have offered her one anyways, incorporeal as he was. Somehow, that wasn’t the point. “No,” she’d said, simple as that. Tilted her head, made a  _ c’mon _ gesture: “You can’t get rained on, dumbass. And I’m fine with it. Let’s go.”

In most of the years he’d spent as her shadow, Mike had been an afterthought — almost always  _ there _ in one form or another, but not a friend, not someone you kept around for any reason. Akin to a framed picture on a wall, one of those mass-produced Ikea ones, and maybe it came with your apartment and you always  _ meant _ to change it to something more personal but never got around to it, so there it is, an entirely unoffensive picture of the Space Needle that you see every day but never remember the existence of. Mike was like that. There, but forgettable. Following along because what else was he going to do, not because he was invited.

But she’d invited him, so he’d snuck out from his awning and had not felt the rain on his skin, even though it was coming down in sheets and he could, if he focused, feel the rhythm of it passing through him like a vibrating in his bones. 

“So,” he’d said, because Jaylen seemed like she was in a good mood, and his opportunities for conversation were pretty limited. “Do you like the rain, then?”

“Nah, not really.” She’d paused. Held her hand out in front of her, cupped slightly, like she was holding a ball. Once a small pool of rain had collected there, she dropped it back to her side; the water crashed down and joined the puddles on the ground. “It just feels good, to feel things. Everything’s passive down there. Nothing  _ happens. _ Even when everything’s happening all at once, it’s also nothing.”

Mike didn’t really get it, when she talked about the void, or the trench, or Hell, or whatever it is everyone’s decided to call the place the dead lie in wait. But still, he nodded.

She continued. Her fingertips drifted up to her neck, feeling her pulse there. Mike wondered distantly if she even knew she was doing it, or if it was a reflex at that point. “I don’t know. It’s just — it’s fuckin’ hard to remember I’m alive, most of the time. But this is — it’s concrete. It’s the world effecting me and me effecting the world, and that’s not something I  _ get, _ not anymore, not when I’m not playing.”

And — that, Mike understood. He’d understood it by its reverse, by the lack of it.

His face must have twisted in a certain way as he’d stared at her, because Jaylen looked away sharply, gaze forward to the road ahead.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said. Quiet enough to be nearly washed away. Crystal clear, even without clarification. Something had twisted anxiously in his stomach at the acknowledgement of his sacrifice; easier not to talk about it, and he’d wished, suddenly, to pretend everything was normal. Jaylen’d doomed so many others to the exact same hell she’d been in. Mike wasn’t there, not exactly, but he wasn’t an exception, either.

Mike’s pretty sure it was the only time he’d ever heard her apologize. She’d openly refused to express guilt for the incinerations that’d followed her around, but here she was, apologizing to Mike Townsend, of all people.

(He’d shaken his head, said  _ it’s fine, _ because that’s what Mike  _ does, _ and he’d let himself fade from view soon after.)

Now, he throws the ball and he catches it, or he doesn’t, and it doesn’t really matter which happens. Improvement is a far-away dream. Skill doesn’t mean anything, anyways — the Garages aren’t exactly in line for ascension, and being  _ good _ has never prevented anyone from being incinerated. 

If he’s going to go up in flames, it’ll happen anyways. He  _ thinks _ his team probably won’t celebrate it, but who knows? He heard the Crabs threw a party when Henderson died. Which, yeah, Tillman was kind of a dick, but — still.

It doesn’t inspire huge amounts of confidence in him. Not much does, anyways. Anyone who’s ever met Mike could tell you he’s not exactly a guy who projects confidence. Like, not at all.

He keeps throwing until his arm hurts, and his clothes are soaked through, and his skin is freezing, and his hair hangs in front of his eyes, and his vision is blurry, and when the ball escapes his grasp and rolls halfway down the parking lot he can’t see well enough to retrieve it. He stands out there a while longer, anyways, just to remind himself that he exists in the world. He lets the knowledge of it wash over him until he’s shivering.

***

(Somewhere in Charleston, Jaylen Hotdogfingers is throwing a pitch and catching it as it leaps back towards her, every time, like clockwork. Like a tree falling in a forest, nobody is around to see.

No one could know every pitch in Charleston and Seattle hits at the exact same time, a resounding rhythm created from halfway across the country.)

***

Season ten starts bitterly and only gets worse.

It’s a punishment, Jaylen thinks. Knows. She’s alive again and her heartbeat is strong, but god is alive, too. The Shelled One has cast down its judgement and found the league wanting.

It’s Jaylen’s fault. She feels this, bonemarrow-deep, guiltier for the Shoe Thieves’ defeat than she’s ever felt for any action she’s ever taken. Everything else has served a  _ purpose, _ but the crows that now flock to her shoulders when she pitches do not offer her explanations for her failures. They don’t make a single noise. They’re silent as the grave, and so is she, and that’s fucking  _ hilarious, _ isn’t it?

(She’s very conscious that they’re called a murder of crows. What does that make her, having been absorbed into their flock?)

The Shoe Thieves huddle together as if being a unit will save them, and Jaylen, separate despite the colors of her jersey, stands alone through the bloodrain and the birds and the eclipses. She hides the tremble in her hands whenever the sky goes dark with an increased ferocity to her pitches.

She keeps checking her pulse. Before the game. Between each inning. She lets the crows dig their claws into her shoulder deeply enough that she can feel her veins pulsing beneath the talons, and if they draw blood it’s just another reminder she’s alive.

The thing about being alive, the thing she didn’t really anticipate, is the threat, once again, of that being taken from her. The terror of it all.

She wonders if everyone alive feels like this. Seven billion people in the world, all with this constant  _ fear. _

***

The first time the Garages and the Shoe Thieves play each other, half the season has already passed, and that fear has made a home somewhere deep in Jaylen and Mike both.

Choux Stadium has rebuilt since the last time Mike was in Charleston. If not for the bleak anticipation that still hangs in the air and the peanut shells still piled up in corners of the stands, he could almost believe it’d never happened.

Technically, he doesn’t have to be there, the first day of the series. Most every team’s pitching rotation has decided by now that there’s no point in showing up to games they don’t play in — the ones who are friends with their team do so anyways, sitting in the dugout and cheering every strike thrown, while the others wait in their away-game hotel rooms with a quiet dread in the silence. He assumes there’s dread, at least. He can’t really imagine a world in which there isn’t.

He doesn’t show up to most games he doesn’t pitch. When he does, the team insists he sit with them, and they try to talk to him, but none of them really know  _ how _ to, and he’s lost his handle on how to be a person by this point, so the conversations are unbearably awkward at best. 

On day forty-six of the season, Mike purposefully arrives late. He appears halfway through the second inning, and he sticks to the back of the stadium, where the blood raining down can’t touch him and the Garages can’t see him. It’s remarkably easy to go unnoticed. He’s not sure how much that’s a consequence of the shadows still clinging to the edges of him, or if it was always true, but it’s useful, now.

The fans cheer as much as always, waving their arms around beneath their umbrellas and screaming at the top of their lungs. Mike scans the crowd once, twice, a third time, looking for a familiar face, but Jaylen isn’t there.

Mike stays until the Thieves and Garages are no longer tied. In the sixth inning, Gwiffin loses a few pints of blood and the Shoe Thieves score a run in quick succession, and Mike Townsend walks out of the stadium. Outside, the rain washes crimson into the gutters.

On day forty-seven of the season, Mike is pitching.

He throws and throws and throws and the Shoe Thieves get an instant home run, Richardson Games rounding the bases before Mike has a chance to blink. (“Townsend,” the crowd cries, synonymous to a boo.) 

He pointedly avoids the gaze of his teammates where they sit on the bench. It’s not gonna help, seeing the way they’re  _ trying _ not to judge him but not quite succeeding. He looks to the stands instead, scans the crowd — he doesn’t even have to  _ look _ at the batter to throw the ball to the same place every time, it’s so automatic and so futile an effort.

In the third inning, he sees Jaylen in the nosebleed seats. She must have redyed her hair recently; it’s a shock of ruby in a sea of half-hazy unfamiliarity. She leans back with her feet put up on the back of the chair in front of her; a ten-seat radius on each side of her is left empty. Even debtless, people know better than to get too close.

Well. Most people, at least. Mike, as he walks to the edge of the field in between the third and the fourth, waves at her.

She gives him a thumbs up back, and a smile.

(Duende, as Greer strikes out on the field: “Who were you wavin’ to?”

Mike thinks about telling the truth. But it’s been half a year since he came back and he hasn’t explained his time in the shadows to the team. And he hears the way they talk about Jaylen, the regret they have. He doesn’t regret trying to save her, even if it did turn out badly — fact of the matter is, they’re both here, now, and all the complicated feelings in the world can’t overwhelm the relief he feels to be in the same place as her, and to know that they are both alive.

“Old friend,” Mike says, and it’s not a lie. He doesn’t think it’s a lie.)

The Garages don’t score a single point until the last inning, but at least it isn’t a shutout. Mike finds it in himself to be happy about that.

***

On day forty-eight of the season, Jaylen pitches against the Garages.

Seattle’s moved on without her in it; most of the players she stares at from the pitching mound are not the ones she played with, whether she’s counting only the ones before her death or the ones who feared her after her return. It’s like the universe is spitting in her face: she can’t lay any claim to her old team, not anymore, not when there’s more unfamiliar faces than there ever were friendly ones.

Her pulse hammers against her fingertips, and she throws strike after strike after strike after —

Greer Gwiffin takes the plate.

And the thing is —

The new Garages are, arguably, blameless. They are not the ones who brought her back, though they’ve suffered the consequences along with everyone else in the league. No one’s really innocent in blaseball, but this anger isn’t for them.

But when Mike tugged Jaylen out of the void and shoved her into the Garages’ tour van and slammed the door behind her — Greer was in the driver’s seat. Wasn’t there in that first season, but he helped them bring her back, and she remembers the look in his eyes when she’d started hitting people with pitches, that instantaneous regret. The  _ we should have let her rot. _

Jaylen throws a ball. Jaylen throws another ball. Jaylen’s heartbeat is loud, ringing in her ears, and it feels good to feel this anger, to feel anything at all.

The Garages resurrected her only to abandon her. There were always going to be consequences for defying death, and they weren’t prepared to deal with them, and Jaylen thinks about all the times she saw them huddled together in the locker room without her, and Jaylen thinks about all the times she’s seen every team she’s been on since do the same thing, all equally unprepared to deal with the repercussions of their actions.

Jaylen thinks about all of this, and she raises the next ball up in the air.

She drops it, straight down.

Before it hits the ground, dozens upon dozens of crows have taken silent flight through the air towards Gwiffin.

And she does it again — Summers Pony, and then Greer, again. It isn’t about winning. She hears the announcers from up on high:  _ what are we going to do with all these birds? _ , and Jaylen knows the answer.

(She wishes, momentarily, that the birds would be more than harmless. She thinks about them plucking out players’ eyes or carrying them away, as if in a particularly grim fairytale.

She could tell them to. A crow sits on her shoulder, another circling just above her head, a grim halo. She could whisper to them:  _ give ‘em your worst. _ The crows would understand.

She doesn’t. This makes her kinder than most people assume her to be, though she has no doubt the thought alone would villainize her if she spoke it aloud.)

There’s a nice bit of symmetry in the game ending at the exact score Mike’s game the day before ended at; the Garages shame the Shoe Thieves in the last inning, getting ahead by four runs before Esme finally flinches their way to a game-over. 

When the stands clear and both teams have fled to their respective locker rooms, Jaylen sticks around. The crows cloud around her head. Her hair’s gonna be a fucking disaster from how their wings are beating around, their claws itching to make her into a nest as if she could ever be a home for anything living, but she pulls a baggie of birdseed out of her pocket and lets them pluck it from her palm anyways. Least she can do.

***

The stadium is empty by the time Mike walks onto the field. The flapping wings of Jaylen’s crows ring loudly enough to drown out his footsteps, and for a moment, it’s almost like he doesn’t exist, like he’s immaterial again.

Jaylen’s sitting up against the wall on the opposite side, grimacing up at the birds perched on her head. Most of them have flown away, but a stubborn few stick around, weaving all sorts of debris from the field into her ponytail, and the glare she gives them would be deadly if Mike were not so familiar with what  _ actually deadly _ looks like on Jaylen’s face.

He tries to stifle his laugh. Seriously, he does.

Jaylen looks up sharply at the sound. “Oh,” she says. “Hey.”

“Hey,” echoes Mike. “D’you mind if I —” and he gestures to the ground next to her.

Jaylen shoos the birds away from her. They disappear somewhere into the rafters of the stadium. Mike imagines the massive nests that must be waiting for them up there, and thinks his own soulless apartment back in Seattle must seem depressing in comparison. That’s true of nearly anything it could be compared to, though. No use being jealous of birds.

“So,” Jaylen says, at the exact moment Mike blurts out, “What the hell was  _ that, _ Jay?”

Jaylen blinks. “What?”

“The — the birds? I didn’t, uh, actually  _ talk _ to the team, but — Gwiffin looked pecked half to death out there. Y’didn’t have to go after him  _ twice.” _

Jaylen rests her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee, and looks sideways at Mike. “Hi, Jaylen,” she says, raising her voice by a half-octave in a half-awful impression of Mike’s. “Wow, I haven’t seen you since you fought a  _ literal god, _ how are you doing? Sorry I didn’t text, or call, or do anything to acknowledge being alive again. Too busy with the band. You know how it is, don’t you,  _ Jay?” _

“Okay,” says Mike, softly surprised. He looks at her with eyes wide, processing the muffled anger she’s thrown at him. It’s not what he’d expected. Should he have expected it? Maybe he should’ve. “Sorry. Uh.”

“It’s fine,” Jaylen says, though the bitterness remains. “Sure you’ve been busy.”

“Not really?” Mike shakes his head. “The band’s kinda, uh, wary. Of people who come back from the dead. I mean, they tried to not be weird about it, I know, but…”

“They think you’re gonna turn out like me.”

“I dunno what they’re thinking,” Mike says, because saying  _ yes _ seems cruel.

“If you were gonna start beaning people, you would’ve, already. They know that, right?” Jaylen pauses. When she speaks again, the anger’s softened at the edges, turned into something more teasing. “Not like you  _ could. _ Throws the ball in the same way, to the same place — like, a batter’d have to  _ really _ fuck up to get in the way of that.”

“Hey!” Mike elbows her in the side. He’s surprised when it actually connects, hits her hard enough in the ribs to get an exclaimed  _ ow. _

“Okay, fair, I earned that one,” Jaylen says, though not before elbowing him back. She’s all sharp edges. He’s halfway surprised it doesn’t slice him open where her arm connects with his.

“Anyways. I don’t think it’s about hitting people. It’s just the echo they’re uncomfortable with — or, I dunno, maybe it’s just  _ me. _ I mean, they did the whole  _ Credit to the Team _ thing, but I don’t know if they ever really liked me all that much.”

It’s not the first time he’s thought it, but it is the first time he’s let those thoughts escape into open air, and he immediately wishes he could swallow them back down. It’s embarrassing. It’s mortifying, sitting here and complaining to Jaylen, of all people, that the Garages don’t like him anymore, probably never did — she’s got more than enough issues of her own to deal with, doesn’t need his chronically low self-esteem added to the plate.

But she just shrugs, leans over so her shoulder hits against his. The pressure is comforting, even if touch is still something he has to consciously keep himself from flinching away from. “They should be glad you’re back,” she says. Matter-of-fact, like it’s that simple. “You’re not me. That’s a good thing. They’re fuckin’ stupid if they don’t see that.”

Mike thinks about contrasts. Jaylen was beloved before her death and hated after her resurrection, both with equal passion. Mike was… tolerated, at best, before he’d gone into the shadows. Maybe it makes sense that the same would be true after.

“That’s not fair,” he says aloud. Defending the team was always his number-one priority, even back when they were writing songs actively mocking him and locking him out of the Garage at every opportunity. 

“Doesn’t have to be,” Jaylen says.

Before Mike can figure out a reply, Jaylen’s standing up, leaving a void of space beside him. She offers him a hand, and he brushes the dirt off his jeans, follows her automatically.

“Sorry for snapping at you,” Jaylen says as they leave the stadium, and it’s the second time Mike has ever heard her apologize for anything. She says it like it’s not a big deal, but Mike spent three years figuring out how to read Jaylen. She must’ve been desperately lonely, to be willing to apologize so quickly to keep him around.

And it’s not like he’s judging. He’s got a hauntingly empty apartment back in Seattle, a guitar that’s been collecting dust since he came back, a team that claims to care about him but doesn’t meet his eyes. It’s kind of ridiculous, the parallels they’ve been running in.

“‘s okay,” Mike says. “Sorry my idea of a greeting was, uh, to lecture you about the birds. I mean, I’m still wondering about that, but — should’ve said hi first. So. Sorry.”

“It’s a fair question,” Jaylen says, and the accompanying laugh is only a little bitter. “Birds wouldn’t actually hurt any of them. Not unless I told them to, and I’m — well, I’m not really doing that anymore. Not trying to, at least. Hey, do you know which Charleston we’re in?”

“What? Uh. Illinois.”

“Okay. I can work with that.” Jaylen picks a direction and starts leading them… somewhere. Mike’s used to following her. Even considering everything she’s done, Jaylen’s the closest friend he’s got, at this point — and maybe that should worry him, but it doesn’t. He trusts her. 

“So what’s the point? If you weren’t trying to hurt them.”

“There have to be a point?”

“Uh, yeah?”

Jaylen shrugs. “Aren’t you ever angry at them?”

Jaylen has more than enough reasons for anger, just as the rest of the league has a mile-long list of names giving them cause to be angry with her in return. Mike’s talked about each and every one with her already, but no one has asked him for his own reasons. No one’s considered that  _ he _ might be mad at them.

Mike takes too long to answer, and Jaylen sings, “It’s another awful day, it’s another awful day for Mike —”

“Yeah, I get it. I get it. Where’re we going?”

Jaylen pauses, like she’s forgotten how to explain herself to people. Mike — well, he gets that, too. He assumes she has about as many conversations at this point as he does, which is to say, not a lot. This is the most he’s talked to anyone without wanting to make a hasty getaway since he came back. “Remember that bar around the corner from my apartment, back in Seattle? The really dark one. Found one like that around here.”

“You know I have to be on a plane to Dallas in the morning, right?”

Jaylen snorts. “You got four games till you’re even playing again. You don’t even have to  _ be _ in Dallas. C’mon.”

He can’t really argue with that. She’s right. He wasn’t going to go to any of the Steaks games, anyways. A part of him says it would be nice to see Allison again, but a louder part points out that it would be just as awkward as every other interaction with the Garages, former or present.

The bar is a shitty little hole-in-the-wall with the dimmest overhead lights Mike’s ever seen. One of them flickers out as he watches. There’s one person at the far end of the bar, and a single bartender who looks like she couldn’t care less about anything that’s going on.

It is, altogether, exactly the kind of place Mike feels comfortable in nowadays. Bright lights give him a headache; too many people talking all at once is liable to make him shut down entirely if he doesn’t have headphones to drown it out. That was true even before the shadows, but they certainly didn’t help the matter; crowds are all the more overwhelming after several years spent as a ghost.

The  _ where _ sorted out, Mike turns to a different question. “Why?”

“Why what?” Jaylen sits down at the bar. Mike sits beside her, brow furrowed.

“Why’re we here?”

Jaylen’s fingertips drum against the bar. It’s a familiar rhythm; it takes Mike a moment to recognize it as a heartbeat. “Celebrating,” she settles on. “You’re alive. I’m alive. Against every fuckin’ odd. I think that’s worth getting drunk over.”

The bored-looking bartender chooses that moment to acknowledge them, as if pulled by the siren-call of people discussing drunkenness. Jaylen orders for both of them. The same shitty beer they’d kept stocked in the Garage’s backroom fridges.

“I was never dead,” Mike points out as soon as the bartender is gone. He’s been holding the words in his mouth for the last two minutes.

“You weren’t in the void,” Jaylen says, raising her eyebrows. Like she’s correcting him. “Doesn’t mean you were  _ alive.” _

“It’s not the same —”

“Yeah, Mike, I was there. Also, you see any other experts on being dead around here? I’m telling you, it’s close enough.”

“Thanks. Really makes me feel better about it all,” Mike says, dryly, as he wrestles with his awful keychain bottle-opener. Jaylen takes the bottle from him and reveals it was a twist-off cap all along, which makes Mike want to melt into the floor, just a little bit. He downs half the bottle instead.

“I’m just saying — and hear me out here, alright? It’s fucking rough, not existing for years. And it’s rough coming back and having everything be different. You got out without debt, and honestly, if anyone deserves a get-out-of-death-free card, it’s you. I don’t put a lot of stock in being a good person, for obvious reasons, but — You’re a really good person, Mike. A good friend. So we’re celebrating you being alive, because life’s short as hell and this game is way too dangerous to  _ not _ celebrate that, okay?”

For a long moment, Mike can’t do anything but stare at Jaylen. “Jesus, Jay,” he says. And then, the words clicking into place: “Are we friends?”

Jaylen laughs. It’s too loud for the small space, and the person at the other end of the room lifts their head to give her a dirty look, but it’s genuine and full of life. “Yeah, Mike. I think so.” She says it like she doesn’t really know, but wants to sound like she does, anyways.

“Cool,” Mike says. “Well, uh.” He raises his half-full bottle in the air, smiles a little lopsidedly. “To being alive, then. To being alive to pitch shitty games and fight gods and do whatever the hell else we wanna do.”

Jaylen grins back at him. The clink of their bottles rings through the room. “To being alive.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! shoutout to sim, who got me super invested in jaylen and mike being friends. [go read their fics i promise you won't regret it.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy)
> 
> leave a comment if you enjoyed! it'll make my day!!
> 
> find me on tumblr @haunthouse or twitter @eviljaylen, or hanging around in the crabs discord server. claws up!


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